Spy vs Spite

Some First Amendment lawyers find it curious that the ADL would even be getting into the business of speech filters. The Anti-Defamation League, after all, considers itself a civil rights organization. Judging from literature promoting the HateFilter software, it's clear the ADL is thinking about the apparent conflict between the civil right of free speech, and the limitation of speech inherent to Internet filtering software. Almost every page of HateFilter literature mentions the First Amendment, and explains that the ADL does not seek to censor or limit speech on the Internet. The HateFilter does not remove sites or censor their content, says ADL Director Elizabeth Coleman; it only blocks these sites from coming into the home at the parents' discretion.

Parents have good reason for wanting to keep these sites off their computers, Coleman says. Many extremist sites cater to children, she says. For example, the World Church of the Creator site has a special link for kids. Other sites, she says, are highly polished, presenting themselves as mainstream academic thought. This misinformation, she says, can lead to the kind of violence that has made headlines in recent years. Last August, for example, three teenagers firebombed a judge's house in San Jose, believing he was Jewish. (He was actually Catholic.) Investigators say two of the kids had used computers at school to access white supremacist Web sites. Also, Matthew and James Williams, brothers suspected of murdering a gay couple in Redding and setting fire to three synagogues in Sacramento, were reported to have been led astray by radical right philosophies ferried on the Internet. (Although at 31 and 29 years of age, the brothers would not have been constrained by an Internet filter aimed at minors.)

Coleman says the best part of the HateFilter is that it doesn't just block sites, it also routes Internet surfers back to links on the ADL Web page that provide information about extremists such as white supremacists or Holocaust deniers. "Nobody else has the same educational component," she says.

But critics of Internet filters wonder if they actually do more harm than good. A highly regarded study by Chris Hunter, a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania, for instance, found that the devices block an average of 21 percent of Web sites containing useful, legal information, while failing to block an average of 25 percent of sites containing "objectionable" content. (The ADL's HateFilter was not included in the study.)

Even organizations that have historically spoken out against racism and gay-bashing, such as the American Civil Liberties Union, object to Internet speech filters. Ann Brick, an attorney with the civil rights organization, says that one of the inherent risks of filters is that consumers never know the political or commercial biases of the filter's manufacturer. "The ADL is a partial organization, in that they have a point of view," she says. "And what they consider hate speech might be a complex exposition of the Israeli-Arab conflict."

The Southern Poverty Law Center, another civil rights organization that publishes its own annual list of extremists on the Web, is also unconvinced of the efficacy of filters. Joe Roy, director of the center's intelligence project, says his organization supports any effort to fight hatred, but would not endorse a speech filter because, in the organization's opinion, filters simply don't work.

The ADL's software manufacturer, CyberPatrol, has taken an especially hard beating from critics who say the filtering software has mistakenly blocked sites such as Creatures Comfort Pet Care Service and the MIT Project on Mathematics and Computations, for their explicit sexual content.

Because the HateFilter has a narrower scope, ADL officials say, it is more sophisticated than other filters on the market. "You're getting 85 years of knowledge and experience monitoring these groups," says Coleman. "Yet we want to be subtle. You can't use a sledgehammer in this endeavor."

And in a limited test run of the software, the HateFilter does appear to be more refined than its competitors. It doesn't block the Pat Buchanan Web site, though Buchanan has been critical of Israel and made controversial statements about Jews in the past. It does block a site called Radio Islam, which blatantly flaunts its hatred of Jews. It also blocks what appears to be a very thoughtful -- and hardly controversial -- site called Interracial Voice, containing a long list of essays describing the challenges of growing up with parents from different cultures.

Elizabeth Coleman says the ADL's block on the Interracial Voice page was an oversight.

The ADL will not provide a list of blocked sites, officials say, because in the wrong hands, it could be used as a kind of address book for extremists, allowing them easier communication with one another. Without a list of blocked sites, however, it's hard to get a picture of what the ADL deems inappropriate for children. And an understanding of this bigger picture is important, critics say, because contrary to Coleman's claims, the ADL has a history of making blacklists that do, in fact, attack legitimate schools of thought with a sledgehammer.